A food product called a "quenelle", made from a thin and moist paste mixed with additives such as fish, meat, poultry or vegetables, has long been known. When prepared in the conventional way, the basic paste, also known as a a "panade", is made by cooking a cereal flour and/or semolina in an aqueous medium. The flour and the liquid phase consisting of water and/or milk is kneaded and cooked in a paste kneader/steamer, and the proportions can be, for example, 50 liters of water per 50 kg of flour and/or semolina. The cooking must be carried out over a fairly long period to produce sufficient dehydration of the substance with expansion of the starches, and can take from three to five hours. The bread soup thus obtained is then mixed with meat or plant substances and/or, if appropriate, fatty substances and egg. Pre-cooking makes it possible to stabilize the product, which can be extruded in the form of elongate round bars 5 to 20 cm long which can be kept for 5 to 6 days at a fairly low temperature, the final cooking being produced merely by poaching.
Because of the relative difficulty of the preparation and especially of the cooking time, the quenelle has remained, by and large, a luxury product, and this conventional method of preparation has been practically given up and is still being used only in small-scale production in some regions. At the present time, in fact, the basic paste is made industrially by preliminary drying of a wheat flour for several hours in continuous ovens, the dried flour being then mixed with the required quantity of a liquid phase. This industrial process remains fairly time-consuming and can be used, in practice, only with wheat flours, since semolinas are especially likely to run the risk of scorching before the starch has burst.